Sprint’s HTC Hero was my first and is my current Android hand held. It ran Android 1.5 when I first got it. Coming from a Treo 755p I was impressed with the responsiveness of my new Hero. However, as I loaded on more and more third party Apps and Widgets I began to see sluggishness issues. However, the Android 2.1 upgrade introduced an absurd phone call lag.
Making a phone call could sometimes take as much as 2 minutes for the dialing indicator to show up. While I am waiting for the dialing to start I’m asking myself, “Did I press it?” “Is it doing anything?” Unsure if I selected the number to dial, I would sometimes press it again. When the call finally goes though I found out that I was making two calls to the same person. Sometimes, I’d be waiting for the call while I was driving. This resulted in frustration at having to take my eyes off of the road repeatedly to check if the call was starting or not. Very annoying!
How To Fix Sprint’s HTC Hero Call Lag
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I found different ways that other people fixed their call lag issue. None worked for me until I changed Launchers. If you are not familiar with the term Launcher, it is the App that you use to launch other Apps. The Hero comes with HTC’s Sense User Interface, this is the default Launcher. I was trying out another Launcher just to try it out. I was not trying to solve any particular problem. I tried Go Launcher and then ADW.Launcher. After trying them both I settled on ADW.Launcher. After I got the launcher just the way I like it I made ADW.Launcher my default and restarted the phone. In affect I stopped using Sense completely. What I noticed was that calls that I made went through faster that they use to. Where as I use to have to wait sometimes 2 minutes for the dialing indicator to show up it seemed that it came up in seconds. I began to time the dialing response and found that the dialing indicator now comes up in about 5 seconds.
Why does this work? Perhaps Sense leaks memory? I’m not sure. It is just faster now and I am happy.
ADW.Launcher is like Sense it that it can have seven home screens, widgets, short cuts, and all the normal Android features. It has the advantage of having three or five, quick launch buttons along the bottom where Sense has the phone, plus, and up arrow buttons. Additionally ADW.Launcher is far more configurable that Sense. Needless to say I am a lot happier with my Hero now. A good way to end on a high note since I pay to get a Sprint HTC Evo Shift 4G in a few weeks.
Terry.